I posted on the blog and was ignored, so I'm going to repeat myself here. I've been developing viewers for several years, having started once the OpenSource program was first opened to the public. Through the process of developing viewers, playing with the sourcecode, etc, I have learned many things about viewer-side security.
The most important myth to disspell is that requiring viewers to register in a central area is going to improve security at all. Even if viewers were registered to a central database, all someone else would have to do is steal the registration code from a legitimate viewer and spoof any hashes that are sent. It's been done, and it is extremely trivial. In addition, other viewers created by casual developers who are just poking around in the code are probably not going to register, especially if said developer is new to the whole development deal. And what about projects like my viewer, which are unfinished but may need to connect to the grid every so often to test features as they are completed/broken? And member-in-good-standing is rather vague, when you consider that the terms of service authorizes LL to ban users for whatever reason they see fit. I got logged off the other day while idling in my home sim, with no one around, and received no email as to why I got nailed. Fix your policies before you try adding more of them. Too long, didn't read? *This isn't going to work.* Want advice? Beef up the G-Team so they have more members to deal with viewer issues rather than have <10 guys dealing with 36000+ simulators-worth of ARs. There's my two cents. Spend wisely. On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 10:25 -0700, Rob Lanphier wrote: > Hi folks, > > I'd like to make sure you all see the announcement of the upcoming 3rd > party viewer policy: > https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/10/20/third-party-viewer-policy > > Followups need to be directed to the forum: > https://blogs.secondlife.com/thread/3731 > > ....since many people involved in crafting the new policy are not on > this mailing list, but will be monitoring that forum. > > Thanks > Rob > > _______________________________________________ > Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: > http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev > Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
